ACT x Medardo Rosso

ACT x Medardo Rosso 
This year’s Basel edition of the ACT Performance Festival takes place in direct conversation with the exhibition Medardo Rosso. Inventing Modern Sculpture (29 March – 10 August 2025) and is hosted by Kunstmuseum Basel. The two-day festival opens on Friday 25 April 2025 with a talk by artist Alexandra Pirici, artist and Professor for Performance in Contemporary Art at AdBK Munich.

Medardo Rosso (1858 – 1928), who considered sculpture a performative act and often staged public casting sessions, offers a compelling lens through which to examine performance today. At the end of the 19th century, he redefined the medium of sculpture, dissolving its boundaries to capture fleeting moments in wax, plaster, and bronze. His figures hover between presence and disappearance, between solid form and ephemeral impression—always intimate, never monumentally heroic. ACT Basel 2025 thus finds a rare and meaningful context within Rosso’s sculptures, drawings, and photographs, set in the unique environment of a world-renowned museum.

Conceived as an open laboratory for students of Swiss Art Academies to experiment with performative artistic strategies, ACT places central importance on the dynamic between performances, performers, and the audience that unfolds in the live setting. The focus is on process and the reciprocal exchange between students and the audience. In this special edition, this exchange extends beyond the immediate performance space—connecting with the comprehensive retrospective of Medardo Rosso and the Kunstmuseum Basel itself as the venue of ACT Basel 2025.

The Exhibition Space and the Expansion of Performance by Alexandra Pirici 
On Friday 25 April 2025, the festival opens with the talk The Exhibition Space and the Expansion of Performance by Alexandra Pirici, artist and Professor for Performance in Contemporary Art at AdBK Munich. As the festival’s keynote speaker, Pirici sets the stage for ACT Basel 2025 with reflections on the historical and contemporary relevance of performance. Performance is a notion that names many things: movement, body experimentation, dance, expression…. But in 2025 performance also underscores the fundamental importance of presence: being there, being there for each other as well as being there to be perceived and acknowledged. Pirici’s introductory talk connects performative practices to the convention of the exhibition space and the context of the museum. Looking at performance as an intermedial field, her contribution offers a brief survey of its history—its ongoing evolution and expansion into new forms and formats, in response to a transforming (art)world. Furthermore, it emphasizes the potential of live action and/or other forms of agency to reshape and complexify traditional exhibition displays.

ACT Performance Festival  
Since 2003, the ACT Performance Festival of Swiss Art Academies has offered students a platform to realize performances and performative projects. After its 20th anniversary edition in 2022 in Biel/Bienne, the festival once again stops in various cities in Switzerland—as it did before and after.

ACT is a joint project of Swiss Art Academies: 
EDHEA Valais – F+F Zurich – HEAD Geneva – HGK Basel FHNW – HKB Bern – HSLU D&K Lucerne – ZHdK Zurich